Big Brain Theory

SCOTT BERINATO: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Scott Berinato. Today, we’re going to talk about brain science. But don’t worry, I’m going to bore you with retrosplenial cortex or multi-voxel pattern analysis. Our guests know all about those things, but they’re here to talk about something much more exciting to us.

How recent breakthroughs in neuroscience are advancing our knowledge of how we do and how we should do knowledge work. The new science will fundamentally change how we approach tasks such as creative thinking, and how we structure rewards, and how we multitask, among others.

I’m joined today by neuroscientists Adam Waytz of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Malia Mason of Columbia Business School. They’re two young rising stars in the neuroscience community, and the authors of the July/August HBR feature, “Your Brain at Work.” Adam and Malia, thanks for joining us.

ADAM WAYTZ: Thanks very much for having us.

MALIA MASON: Thank you.

SCOTT BERINATO: So, I want to start, Malia, with just asking about this new approach to brain science we talk about in the article in the July/August issue of HBR, this network’s approach.

MALIA MASON: Well, I think one of the things that has changed is, we’ve gone from thinking about what specific brain areas do to thinking about what networks of brain areas do. And one of the reasons why that’s important is because, it turns out that the specific brain area has a multitude of functions.

And what its significance is, why we’re seeing it active for any given task, really it’s hard to determine that without looking to see what other brain areas are doing at the same time.

SCOTT BERINATO: Adam, this sounds much more complicated than just looking at a part of the brain quote “light up,” which is the term you always see used in these stories. Is it more complicated, and is it messier to understand what a brain network is doing versus just a region lighting up?

ADAM WAYTZ: Well, I think the networks approach does, it introduces a lot more complexity and nuance. But I think this is a wholly positive development, because what it enables us to do is look at these broad psychological concepts such as motivation, or value, or emotion, and break each of those broad concepts into sort of component parts and look at which particular brain regions are involved in specific aspects of emotion, or motivation, or value, rather than saying, this is the emotion region, this is the motivation region, or this is the value and reward region.

SCOTT BERINATO: There have been neural consultants out there for a decade or more now who’ve been using some of what we’ll call the old brain science of just looking at regions and nodes to promise to business leaders insights into leadership, insights into marketing. Talk to me about how this new approach affects whether they’re selling, essentially.

MALIA MASON: One of the things that we think needs to happen is, people just need to be cautious about the claims that they make. Having taught the leadership course at Columbia, one of the things that I’m aware of is that there’s not even consensus around what leadership is.

And so this idea that you can distinguish a good leader from a bad one by throwing them into a scanner and looking at what their brain is doing just doesn’t seem to hold a lot of weight.

SCOTT BERINATO: That seems to be what has driven, for the past decade, some of this oversimplification of the science that led to what some people jokingly refer to as brain porn, which is these sort of mainstream media reports of, oh, this part of the brain lit up. Therefore, that means x or y. And those were often misleading, if not just completely erroneous, reports.

ADAM WAYTZ: Right. So, I think we want to place a shared responsibility for the dissemination of brain porn on not just the people who are doing this work who are probably, given that their work is going through the peer review process and academic journals, very much trying to be accurate and nuanced in their explanations, but also on the people that are covering these findings in the media and modes of media themselves.

It’s usually breaking news, brain region x is responsible for psychological process y, and there’s no mention of the previous studies that have confirmed this finding as well, or previous studies that have disconfirmed this finding, or an alternate study that says, no, it’s not really brain region x that is responsible for psychological process y. It’s actually some entirely different brain region all together.

So, when you take all of this complexity and have to boil it down into a tweet, or a sound bite, or a headline, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have this information sharpened and leveled to the point where only the sticky idea remains. And the sticky idea is usually going to be, one brain region and one psychological process or one real world activity.

Those are all oversimplifications. And also I want to say that I don’t think this issue is specific to neuroscience, but it’s specific to how science is covered in general.

SCOTT BERINATO: So, we focus on these four networks that brain scientists have looked at quite a bit, the default network, the reward network, the affect network, and the control network. And Malia, I want to know which of these networks you’re most excited about, you’re most working on, and some of the new findings that have really gotten you excited about what you’re learning about how the brain works with regard to knowledge work.

MALIA MASON: Well, I love all the network to be honest, but I think the one that I have the most experience with is probably the default network. And this network was a big surprise to the field. And one of the reasons why I’m really excited about it is because I think it challenged how cognitive neuroscientists were thinking about the brain.

There’s been a tendency among scientists to treat the brain as if it’s this sensory organ that’s responding to input that it receives. And what we came to understand by studying the default network is it that actually, a lot of the brain’s energy and resources are spent really processing information that’s internal.

So, it’s not just a sensory organ that’s reacting to the external world, but it’s continuously processing memories and reflecting on this stuff. And so that was one of the things that I was particularly drawn to study and think about.

SCOTT BERINATO: And as you describe in the article, the more detached you are from any outside stimulus, the more the default network is engaged and can engage in that creative thinking that we consider so important to breakthrough innovation thinking, creative idea generation, that kind of thing.

ADAM WAYTZ: That’s exactly right. Now, what’s interesting to me about the default network and how I think what we know about the default network can say something about innovation is that, now we know what the default network does. And Malia described this as sort of being able to engage in internal processing.

In the same way, the default network is involved in thinking about other geographical locations. And what is most interesting to me is that this exact same network is involved in thinking about other people’s perspectives.

So, anything that involves getting outside the here and now, whether it’s to reflect on your own personal experiences, or to think about your future experiences, or to think about the experiences of another person, or to think about the experiences of people living in a distant geographical location.

That seems to be largely, at least from my perspective, some of the processes that occur when the brain is in this default mode. And you can tell by these processes that these are the precise processes that we would want to be engaged in if we’re trying to be innovative, if we’re trying to anticipate the future, if we’re trying to draw on analogical memory and think about what’s worked in the past.

If we’re trying to think about what are the needs of consumers, and customers, and stakeholders who are outside of my organization, or even just outside of my immediate environment.

SCOTT BERINATO: On the other side from the default network, we have the control network, and we can think of these as almost opposite forces, I think, as you describe it in the article.

ADAM WAYTZ: I think one interesting component to this networks approach is that we have learned that, because of the brain’s finite processing power, that not all networks can operate with the same productivity at once. And so this control network and this default network are indeed anti-correlated, which means the more activity is going on in one, the less activity is going on in the other.

So, what the control network does and this other dorsal attentional network does is that they regulate our mind wandering tendencies. We often need to focus on the here and now and attend to particular tasks that are right in front of us. So, what the control network does is it regulates the default network so we’re not simply all always wandering beyond the here and now.

SCOTT BERINATO: With regards to our understanding of business and knowledge work and all that, as we go forward with the science, how will it bring us forward in this context?

ADAM WAYTZ: So, I think there’s a number of other analyses and analysis techniques that are developing that I think are going to allow us to not just look at what the brain is doing when its processing something in a particular moment in time, but we also have a number of technologies on our hands that can look at how brain function is changing over time.

And so, the addition of new analyses and new techniques that actually combine the functional imaging approach, which really gives us snapshots of the brain at particular moments time versus the ability to integrate that technology with other technologies that look at what’s happening in the brain dynamically over time are then going to give us an even more complete picture of what’s going on in the brain.

And it might be idealistic to say we will get to a point where we can fully read minds, and I think a lot of neuroscientists do, you’re right, shy away from that characterization of neuroscience.

But I do think there’s an implicit goal in what they’re doing and what we are doing, which is really to identify psychological processes from not just looking at what people are doing, not just looking at what people are saying, not just looking at how they’re reacting to stimuli, but the changes in blood flow that are going on in the brains.

And I think that’s really exciting, and I do think that a big, hairy, audacious goal of neuroscience would be to get to the point where we can really pinpoint what’s going on in the brain.

MALIA MASON: Adam and I have discussed this as well, and one thing to emphasize is that the technology that is involved in this is amazing. It’s mind boggling. Some smart group of people got together and figured out that you could take a wire and make it into a coil and create a solenoid or magnet.

And then what you could do is, you could stick someone into that magnet and essentially get images of their brain without opening their skull, and you could figure out which brain areas are active, blood flowing. You could infer the blood flowing between these brain regions. Some smart group of people got together and figured out how to make that happen, and I think it’s worth celebrating that.

SCOTT BERINATO: Adam and Malia, thank you for joining us today.

ADAM WAYTZ: Thanks very much for having us.

MALIA MASON: Thank you.

SCOTT BERINATO: Adam Waytz and Malia Mason are the authors of “Your Brain at Work,” which can be found in the July/August issue of HBR, on news stands now, and found at hbr.org.

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